1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a printing method and a printing apparatus.
2. Related Art
There are printing methods (ink jet recording methods) of printing an image on a medium by discharging ink from nozzles toward the medium. In these methods, various types of ink, including colored ink such as yellow ink, magenta ink, cyan ink, and black ink, and colorant-free clear ink, are used. Furthermore there is proposed a printing method that aims to mitigate the embedding of colored ink in a medium (image) (for example, refer to JP-A-2009-172972). In this method, first a droplet of clear ink is ejected onto the medium, and then a droplet of colored ink is ejected onto the medium so that it lands on the droplet of the clear ink. Then the colored ink droplet spreads on the clear ink droplet while staying wet. With this method, the diameter of a dot formed with the colored ink can be made larger than that formed with colored ink alone. Consequently it is possible to mitigate the embedding of colored ink in a medium.
By discharging colored ink and clear ink in the above manner, the embedding of the colored ink in a medium can be mitigated, but the resultant image is more prone to become blurred as a larger amount of clear ink is discharged. For example, if clear ink is discharged onto an image such that droplets of all the types of colored ink (e.g., yellow ink, magenta ink, cyan ink, and black ink) will land on droplets of the clear ink, namely, if clear ink is uniformly discharged onto a whole image, the resultant image may become blurred, in which case the quality of the image is lowered.